Tonight's featured vendor? Mike and Becky Smith - Simple Living Farm LLC!!!

Their focus? Grow healthy fruits and vegetables for area farmer’s markets and the CSA program they’d be starting the next year. They also began raising free-range meat chickens who are only fed non-GMO soy-free food!

Their delicious produce, including spinach, garlic, onions, tomatoes and those wonderfully sweet carrots, became Certified Naturally Grown in 2016, and they also constructed a large high tunnel in 2013. So many of you have been enjoying the rewards of their season-extending structure – all those radishes, lettuces, greens, carrots and herbs, produced in an unheated greenhouse through the winter… IN OHIO!!

I’ll never forget my first lengthy conversation with Mike at the Piqua market, discussing Big Ag, the importance of what we farmers were all trying to provide, and the risks of pesticides… so enthusiastic, he invited us to join them for a road trip to the Mother Earth News Fair in Pennsylvania… I thought, “Wow, how nice talking to someone so passionate about beliefs we share, and this guy is really friendly… that will definitely change if we bring our two-year-old and my cranky pregnant self on a weekend excursion with them!”

Mike and Becky are also co-chapter leaders of the Upper Valley Weston A. Price Foundation. If you’re not familiar with the group, you’re missing out!! They host a great variety of speakers, all health and food related. We’ve heard fascinating presentations there, from making sourdough breads and fermented foods to gluten intolerance, the dangers of pesticides, and combating common diseases. Meetings are held at the Piqua Nazarene Church, 400 S. Sunset Drive, on the first Tuesday of every month at 7pm.